Sometimes, I run across an article which piques my interest, like the story of Annie Kane, the poor Cochise County girl who developed schizophrenia, and finally ended her own life in Tombstone, or Madam Irene Logan, who was shot to death by Madam Dora Garnett in the the latter's saloon in Brewery Gulch in Bisbee. They are good stories, which should be told, but they are too short to be books, and too long in the telling to be articles. The manuscript I recently submitted to M

The last couple weeks of December were kind of hectic, and it continues. I was working on preparing my manuscript about homicides in the Arizona Territory for submission to McFarland & Co. - editing, collecting photos, getting permissions, etc. I wanted to turn it in on December 31st. I was wrapping it up pretty well, when McFarland sent me the page proofs for The Red Lights Districts of Tucson, 1870 - 1918 with instructions to edit the pages and have an index made. I was giv

One of the issues in publishing through a small publishing house, like McFarland & Co, is it is up to me to procure the illustrations and photographs to accompany the manuscript, and pay for them. It is wild how much the prices vary from archive to archive. By way of example, I was looking for a photograph of William Zeckendorf, a Tucson merchant who was instrumental in the capture and the justice meted out to the murderers of Vincente “Jose” Hernandez, a.k.a. Piedras Negras

I was writing articles about Gila County history for the Payson Roundup awhile back, but they decided to go with more local histories. Well, I guess they ran out of good stories about Payson. Nothing really ever happened here during the territorial era. The history of Payson is just a bunch of ranchers watching their cattle and an occasional prospector looking for traces of gold (which they rarely found). It is a history which is really only of interest to the descendants of

The other day, I was trying to recall the date of the Hernandez-Chaves murders in Tucson. If you do not know the story, Vincente “Jose” Hernandez and his wife, Librada Chaves were murdered in their bedroom in Tucson by burglars on the night of August 6th - 7th, 1873. They were bludgeoned to death with a club made of mesquite wood, and had their throats cut. The perpetrators of the crime -  Jesus Saguaripa, Leocardo Cordova, and Clemente Lopez were captured within twenty-four

Spent a good portion of last week in Las Cruces, New Mexico attending the New Mexico - Arizona History Conference. Submitted my paper...

I came across a history the other day by of a woman named Annie Kane. Annie never killed anyone, or robbed a stagecoach, and was not a...

It has been a rather busy month. My manuscript about the Red Light Districts of Tucson, 1870 – 1917 is still being processed by...

Something I realized in writing about the killing of Irene Logan in Bisbee. Most the gunfights in the Old West were very brief affairs....

Had another one of those moments where I was looking for one thing and stumbled across another story to good not to tell. I have...

My manuscript about the red-light districts of Tucson is now with McFarland and is being processed. Expect it to be released toward the...

My article on the hanging of George Smiley was published in the latest issue of The Journal of the Wild West History Association . The...

McFarland Publishing has accepted my latest manuscript. tentatively titled That Ill-Starred Street: A History of Tucson's Red Light...

Not long ago, I submitted a article to an academic journal which had previously published my work. My submission was rejected. However, I...

I am a ghost hunter. I write about ghosts. Not like those fools who write books about supernatural entities which allegedly inhabit old...

Of late, I have been working on a history of Tucson's redlight districts, Maiden Lane (1865 - 1892) and Gay Alley (1893 - 1916). Though...

My publisher, McFarland, has given me a date for the release of From The Footlights to The Tenderloin: The Tragic Life of Edna Loftus. It...

A while back, I was hosting tours of the Payson Pioneer Cemetery (not ghost tours, mind you), giving people histories about some of the...

'evening all, I have news. First, my book about the actress Edna Loftus will be published in June of this year. It is available for...

In truth I rarely read reviews on Amazon, but I was informed there was any exceptionally bad one - one star - so I went into look at it....